Thanks for sending me down a little mini rabbit hole, this triggered some memories on old teletext decoders for Amiga back in the 90s.
Anyway, I distinctly remember my father getting a new TV with teletext around 1987, and I could play endlessly with that. Also amazing that up until way in the 2000s I knew people who relied on it as the primary source for basic headlines, weather, but also traffic information on trains as well as expected landing times for airplanes. Of course the football standings in the Dutch Eredivisie was possibly the most viewed page of all. Completely wiped out by the internet, but all in all a surprisingly long run for any tech.
p.s. online still available (Dutch)
>Completely wiped out by the internet
It's not at all, although we can discuss the nature of the medium.
>Last year, the Teletekst app was used daily by an average of 690,000 people. They opened the app an average of 2.4 million times per day. The news index on page 101 was accessed 1.9 billion times in 2024, making it the most visited page, followed by the football index 801, with 530 million visits.
https://nos.nl/artikel/2561892-informatief-en-zonder-poppenk... (Dutch news article)
Still that many! Incredible. I do remember reading about Dutch teletext being maintained (content wise) by only one or two people. Fascinating phenomenon.
That looks quite nice. A lot cleaner than the Irish teletext I remember with its very blocky text. I assume it is benefiting from modern fonts on that page and didn't look like that in the 90s?
It re-confirms my view that the terminal can be a great way to consume news if the content is specifically created for that format. Just using elinks to browse news websites doesn't really work well these days. I wonder if there are any telnet-based news services (or similar) out there still.
I just found out today that the Dutch teletext can be viewed through ssh:
`ssh teletekst.nl`